While I disagree with some of the selections–Anne of Green Gables? Heresy!–I said “Amen!” to more than a few. Sex and the City, Red Badge of Courage, Less than Zero, The Mayor of Casterbidge? No thank you! Been there, done that, would love to Eternally Sunshine them from the library of my mind, along with the Collected Manly Misogyny of Ernest Hemingway and the Collected Self-Loathing of Elizabeth Wurtzel.

I was a puzzled by the fact that the top four books are the Twilight novels. I know that there’s a vocal anti-Twilight crowd, but it seems that many readers hated the books so much that they….went and read all of them? All 3,500 pages of them? If you didn’t like Twilight, why would you read the rest of the series–particularly the 756-page final book, Breaking Dawn? It’s like berating a chef for how lousy the food is, but eating the whole four-course meal anyway.

Check out the list–and the smart and funny comments. Agree? Disagree? Have a few books you’d like to add to the list? Feel free to share…

79 Responses to “Regrets? I’ve Had a Few…”

I regret reading The Lovely Bones. I was reading it voraciously, and then the ending make me chuck it against the wall. The same thing happened for me with Atonement. So maybe I’m being too strict with these criteria, letting a bad ending negate my enjoyment of the rest of the reading experience.

I can’t think of many books I regret reading, mostly because if a book sucks, I just stop reading. Case in point: Ariel. THe premise is really cool – post magical apocalypse full of magic/legendary beasts. But sweet gods, I wanted to smack the main character.

I also regret anything by Clive Cussler. The main character is so very, very clearly a Mary Sue, and they’re all just full of little sexist asides, like ‘all women can’t walk past a mirror without staring’ and ‘women really want men to take charge and order for them in a restaurant.’

Ok, Becky, you win. I agree that people can do whatever they want to their own books and that it just gives the author another sale most of the time. It’s just that book burning tends to go along with other behaviors that I find unsavory in the extreme. However, if you’re roasting Bret Easton Ellis and you’ve got marshmallows, I’m there!

I love Dickens. No one creates characters like his. I love “Kavalier and Clay”-I thought it was magnificent and I was sorry to see it end. And going back to the original list, “The Name of the Rose” is one of my favorites of all time. It’s a little hard to get into, but once you’re in, you cannot put it down.

It’s funny to read about the love/hate relationship some of the posters have with the Twilight series. I have never, ever heard anyone express that kind of feeling about the Harry Potter books. Some people didn’t like them but they didn’t feel that they *had* to keep reading them. It’s an interesting phenomenon.

@wondering: God help me, I love the Wheel of Time. Part of it at this point is that I JUST NEED CLOSURE DAMN IT though.

I read a lot of fantasy.

Terry Goodkind’s Sword of Truth… blargh. The first was pretty entertaining but somewhere it just degenerates into his incoherent rants about how socialism is EEEEEVIL and all his characters are terrible and none of it makes any sense and AAAUGH.

Anything I’ve read by Ayn Rand, I have regretted. Maybe they’re going to take away my Intellectual Card, but damn it, I just can’t handle it.

Those kids’ fantasy books, the Eragon series or whatever? I hate then. With all the intensity if a million blazing suns. My boyfriend’s aunt was raving about how it was so amazing that they were written by a 15-year-old. I wrote better than that at age 15, it’s just that my parents didn’t work in the publishing industry. *eyeroll* The fact that it was written by a kid doesn’t make it worth reading. My boyfriend likes telling people the story, because apparently the violence of my reaction was pretty hilarious.

Definitely Anne Rice. After I’d read the first two vampire novels my friend insisted on reading part of The Witching Hour to me. Not enough brain bleach in the WORLD. (Sex with ghost? Not sexy. Sex with ghost who then rebirths as full-grown human through lover? scarring.)

I read a lot of fantasy and I’ve grown to hate some of its tropes. Boy, born insignificant, with unexpected talents, goes on a quest to discover he’s born for greatness instead. And that in multiple trilogies (Raymond Feist, I’m looking at you here).

But the book that made me really, really angry and crying sad and angry tears was Tess of D’Urbervilles. Except for Tess I couldn’t stand anyone in that book. I hated it for exactly the same reasons I have a hard time watching Lars von Trier movies. They give me much to think about but at the same time I sort of abhor them and I’m wary of the man who makes them.

Um, and De Sade. Though I only leafed through 120 days and, unlike Hardy, I knew what to expect. I never got far, but I don’t think I’ll ever forget some of what I read.

@Isa – YES on Eragon. The second book in that series is one of only a handful of books I have ever just totally given up on. Those books were like someone telling you about their really really long boring dream for 600 pages.

@PennyArcadia – I’ve read some de Sade and honestly my major impression of it is that he was kind of a mouthbreather.

For anyone that’s never read any pre-Revolution French porn, I totally recommend it, it is hiiiiilarious. I remember (not in de Sade) a really long scene of a priest trying to decide whether to do some girl anally or vaginally and the author using the phrase “the twin avenues of desire” as the priest agonizes about whether or not to take “the sinful route to pleasure”, aka the butt. I have never read anything more florid in my life.

In regards to reading all of the Twilight books even if you hated them I did that. I have three teenage girls in my family who LOVE them and I felt like if I was going to talk to them about how horrible they were I needed to have actually read them.

@ PennyArcadia – I remember liking Tess when I was in high school, but I haven’t read it since. So I don’t know if I like it or not. However, some of his poetry is amazing. His relationship with his wife was strained, and they lived separate lives for the second half of their marriage (I think they both wanted to do that, and let each other have freedom). Then she died, and he was in his 70s or 80s and basically remembered falling in love with her and produced some really beautiful love poems. I find most love poems barfy and annoying, because it’s so hard to write a love poem about a woman without actually writing about yourself. Which can be ok, but then it’s not really a love poem at all, is it? But his love poems are really incredibly haunting, and seem very dedicated and loving to his wife, without objectifying her or minimizing her. “Under the Waterfall” is one of my absolute favorites.

@PennyArcadia: I absolutely HATE Tess of the D’Urbervilles. Slut-shaming a rape victim? You have got to be fucking kidding me. I would totally wipe that one from my literary memory if I could.

@Cimorene: Hardy’s poetry is somewhat better and those love poems are moving. But I just can’t get past the misogyny of Tess and Mayor of Casterbridge (where the dude sells his wife in a marketplace, for fuck’s sake!)

I hated Tess of the D’Urbervilles, but mostly because it was fucking terrifying. It was like: this is what it is like to be a woman, all bad breaks and no agency until you kill yourself at Stonehenge. I thought the ending wasn’t believable either, because Tess literally didn’t make a decision in the entire novel until she decides to kill herself.

@Isa: I think Ayn Rand is more pseudo-intellectual than intellectual, myself, so I’d say your card is safe.

@Imogen: I agree on Life of Pi. It felt like it was trying too hard, and not doing a very good job. After the way people had raved about it, I thought there must be something deeper there than what I had got out of it. After discussions with them, turns out, nope. That’s really all there is to it.

@Baraqiel: Have you ever read any of the medieval fabliaux? They are hilarious and very dirty, and often involve lecherous priests.

@mischiefmanager: Agreed on Name of the Rose–I may have gasped audibly when I saw Eco on that list. I’ve never been able to get past the first 50 pages of Baudolino, but his other fiction slays me.
I liked Kavalier and Clay, though it seemed a bit over-hyped to me. Now, Wonder Boys. That is a hell of a book (and movie).

@Spark: I have to say, I don’t get the Wonder Boys love. I only saw the movie, but I found the teacher dodgy and the plot pretty lacking. What is so great about it? (That’s a serious question. I didn’t get it).

@Endora: I confess it’s been a while since I read it. The professor IS dodgy, but he works through it and finds a kind of redemption that’s not about him fixing everything/becoming perfect. A lot of people try to tell this sort of story: contained (at a university over a weekend/short period of time), something quirky happens to upset the status quo, but it’s so well executed here. I like his relationship with the dean. It was so easy for the women and his relationships to fall into caricature, but that doesn’t happen. If the characters didn’t feel real to you I can’t convince you otherwise, but it worked for me.

I was duped into reading Chelsea Handler’s “My Horizontal Life”. Someone told me it was actually funny. I guess that’s what you could call it at first, but by the time i finished the book i just felt depressed by the low level of self-worth she had when she was my age.

I once read a Sherrilyn Kenyon Dark Hunter book (because they were giving them away free at a convention and I had nothing to read on the plane) and I made faces and kept going “Really?” (out loud, on the plane) as I read. Similar to the Anita Blake books, it was full of stuff that was supposed to be really sexy, but did not work for me in any way at all. It had similarly detailed outfit descriptions (everyone involved in supernatural romance/horror must wear leather pants. Always. This is what I learned). Best example of inadvertant unsexy: sexy fantastical man says “I want to eat my lunch off of you” in what is (apparently?) a sexy, sexy way. Then he does. And I want to say that it was shrimp fettuccini? And I am very particular about stickyness (and keeping it away from myself) so it just freaked me out instead of turning me on. I cannot remember the actual title, and going by descriptions does not help. Sexy fantastical man! Smart, sassy demon-hunting woman! Unintentional hilarity!

You know, there are very few books I regret reading. Even books that I’ve hated have been good for me in some way–like reading Robinson Crusoe really helped me articulate everything I hate about Defoe, early novels, people who suck, and people who teach high school English without thinking about how they’re socializing children. And now, even when though it made me throw it against the wall, I can use it as a perfect example of shitty literature that gets taught just because a white dude wrote it.

But when I was a kid I read a book that was vaguely prince and pauper-y. A prince hated his life, a pauper was starving, they traded places. The prince realized that being poor sucked, massively. And the poor kid really liked having food every day. So after a few years when the prince-turned-pauper finally got to the pauper-turned-prince and tried to re-trade places, the pauper was like “um i don’t think so” and stayed princely. I hated it for many reasons, not the least that in the end rather than taking the rich kid’s money and splitting it for two stable middle class lives it ended with one miserable and one pampered life, but I remember how I felt after I read it. I was so angry and disgusted that I wasted my time reading it. I really felt like I was going to vomit. I remember the feeling-kind of like I was going to cry, but I didn’t want to cry because I wasn’t sad, and the frustration just turned into nausea.
Damn I was such a little socialist back then. I’m really angry now because I thought of that book. Grr.

Self-Made Man is on the list, and OH MY GOD A-FREAKIN-MEN. I hated that book so much. The chapter on her dating made me want to set it on fire.

My contributions:
-The graphic novel Wanted. It had all the misogyny and misanthropy of a Bret Easton Ellis novel with all the writing skills of a hamster snorting cocaine.
-Fight Club. Oh god did that suck. Also, every other Chuck Pa-whats-his-face.

I reread through the comments, and I had forgotten a few:
-Children of the Mind in which Orson Scott Card intersperses bits of a crappy sci fi plot in amongst chunks of dense philosophical test that amounts to him screaming SEE, I READ STUFF BY NON MORMONS, I SWEAR
-Shadow of the Giant in which Orson Scott Card talks about how the sole goal of women (including the badass awesome Petra character) is to have baaaaaayyyyyybeeeeeez

On The Road which remains the most insufferably pretentious pile of bollocks I’ve ever had the misfortune to trog through and some piece of utter tosh by Charles Bukowski which was so abysmal that I have expunged it from my memories.

[...] Regrets? I’ve Had a Few… – I like this – a new take on those “Top 100 books YOU MUST READ” lists. Instead, we have here a list of Books I Regret Reading. I love it :3 Lol, look how many best sellers are on the list. Lol, look how high up Holden Caufield is ranked. [...]

I also have to cop to reading the entire Twilight series just so that I could mock it thoroughly. I have friends in their thirties who are obsessed with this massive helping of tripe.

Newsflash, Stephanie Meyers… when writing, you might want to make your characters three dimensional or even two dimensional instead of being cardboard cut-outs (Edward and Bella), or when you do actually manage to attach a personality to one of your creations, you might want to keep their character traits consistent (Jacob in Eclipse, where he morphed from kindly attentive all-round good guy to attempted rapist. I threw the book across the room at that point). I have to admit to liking the last book,- wait,liking may be too strong a word. More like being highly amused by the last book- just for the sheer unadultarated insanity. Unintentional hilarity, ho!

Have to say, the book that I regret reading the most was The Giving Tree. It pissed me off then and pisses me off now. I may be taking it personally but too many women are told to give and give and give to men notwithstanding the physical and emotional deveastation it may cause them.